Lokifan

NB: these fics are listed chronologically within their categories, so the best stuff is probably at the end.

If you’d like to make a podfic or translation or remix or do something else inspired by one of my fics, I am thrilled and delighted; please go ahead. I would ask that you please drop me a link, and if you’re all right with it I’ll rec and put a link on the fic and my masterlists. My fic ‘Unforgivable’ is a bit of an exception to the remix/inspired by rule - I will almost certainly be fine if you do anything with it, but it’s the one I have a special attachment to so please ask me first. Thanks very much.

I love comments on older fics. I am always thrilled to get concrit, even if it’s just ‘I didn’t like this part’ - you don’t need to analyse my writing to have a perspective, although obviously analysis is fantastic. Go for it, you’ll make me happy!

Wow. I’m flocking this and hoping you guys will forgive this bit of reflection sounding inevitably self-congratulatory, but I’m really glad I did the love meme. That was bigger than the last time I did one, which was years ago when LJ was far from its heyday but significantly more active. It does seem to have been needed. I needed it, for sure; I feel silly in some ways being so upset by another country’s election (although I’ll be destroyed if the FN wins France, because that will be the end of the European Union). But then it’s brought up the aftershocks of Brexit for me, as well as being terribly upsetting for US citizens, among whom I have several good friends, and the world.

Anyway. The thing I like about the love meme from that POV is that - well, I’ve seen a lot of people try to be positive and optimistic. And I think that’s great if you can manage it and I’m happy for them, but I find it about as useful as a chocolate teapot. And the thing about love memes is that they make you happy because you get to think about good things in your life which are true. And it’s outward - your friends who you love, your fellow fandomers who you admire - not counting your blessings. Which for me is much easier; it doesn’t ask you to Be Positive in that grating way. I’m bad at Being Positive anyway of course. As a Brit I am born with a congenital problem with the Positive gland, oversized in many Americans. :P

(Seriously. I really feel for you guys on this front, because national grief and a strong cultural pressure to be upbeat and positive - even using the word ‘positive’ in this sense is such an Americanism - seems like a dreadful combination.)

Leaving all that aside… I’ve been really quiet lately. So November will come later, but let me tell you about October. ( spooky month was fabulous )

- The love meme is at ~1200 comments and still going strong. What the hell, guys. This is amazing.

- I’m not waving but drowning in a sea of LJ inbox and email notifications. But that is LOVELY. Do keep leaving comments and starting threads as you please.

- Being one of the top posts on LJ gets you random libertarians telling you off for your anti-2016 vitriol, apparently??? Super, super weird. Don't feel the need to go and tell him off though - I appreciate the defenders but a pile-on rather spoils the love meme mood. (I did deeply enjoy therealsnape's telling-off though. Terrifying schoolmarm thing of like, I'm not even going to say anything harsh and yet YOU WILL FEEL SO SMALL AND DISAPPOINTING.)

- Awwwwwww you guys, the thread for me is so lovely I can't even read it properly. I skimread and then I get embarrassed and have to go away. But it's so sweet. And I just love how much this has taken off, it says something really beautiful about fandom that people are so enthusiastic about leaving each other love.

- Speaking of love! ONLY THREE DAYS LEFT FOR LEAVING PROMPTS AT ron_draco_fest. I love Ron/Draco to PIECES and I'm really hoping for lots of juicy prompts to agonise over when I sign up :D Must leave some of my own, too!

Everyone seems to be feeling pretty bruised by 2016; I know I am. Fighting is important, but love is part of the revolution.

LOVE MEME TIME!

The way this works:

- Leave a comment with someone's username (and perhaps a bit of love for them) to start a thread. Then people can reply to that comment with more love for that person. Try scrolling through comments (or hitting CTRL+F to search for a specific username) to find more brilliant people to leave love for!

- This is being run on both LJ and DW. I will do my best to keep up an alphabetical list of the threads so far, so there's not too much duplication, but duplication across LJ and DW is fine.

- Anon is encouraged and preferred, but signed-in is fine too. If nothing else, signing in and out without an add-on bar is just deeply annoying :)

- Putting yourself up for a thread is ENCOURAGED.

- You don't have to say anything super complex or deep or meaningful. A ♥ is just as happy-making!

- try to check if you're replying to the post or a comment - there are some stray comments which is always sad!

NB: in the UK, the ninth of November – the day we knew Trump had won – is written 9/11/16.

A cheap comparison to make, maybe; No one died or jumped to escape the flamesThey're live and whole in the... land of the free?But it's a brave (bad) new world all the same.(Live? I knew a woman who killed herselfWednesday, before she could lose her healthcare.Come January access to help and healthWould be considered more than her fair share.)Americans say, how could it happen here? Europeans say, we've seen this before.And the Middle East holds its breath for fearOf breathing the flames oxygen, of more.Cheap comparison. But the date seems like kismetNow we can only wait; the worst hasn't happened yet.

I think a lot of us are feeling a bit bruised. How d'you feel about a (multifandom) love meme? I'm thinking I'll run one this weekend on my LJ & DW. (And maybe try to make something happen using Tumblr? Tumblr doesn't have good infrastructure for this but we could try using tags.) If anyone wanted to make a pretty banner for a love meme (running Thursday 17th til Sunday 20th) I'd be ever so grateful. *big eyes* Or I can make one myself; I liked the one I made last time I did a love meme, although more because it had cats than because it was in any way good.

So, if I did this, would people come? I've noticed a dramatic drop-off in LJ usage in the last few months, but I also think people are hanging out here more than usual right now for the sake of fellow-feeling...

First impressionImpression nowFavorite momentIdea for a storyUnpopular opinionFavorite relationshipFavorite headcanon

Remember, this is the non-horrible post BUT YOU'RE TOTALLY ALLOWED TO DISAGREE WITH MY OPINIONS IN PUBLIC. Just be prepared for me to be all 'no, because...' but none of that means I like you any less :)

I’m still crushed. Heartbroken and furious and frightened. And it’s not only about having Trump as the US President. Clinton deserves to be the American president. She’s flawed, of course - as we all are, and certainly every president has been. I have plenty of friends who consider those flaws a bigger problem than I do and I truly do understand those concerns; particularly for the more doveish I see why you wished she weren’t the nominee, although I think the idea that Sanders (or Johnson or Stein, holy fuck) would be a better president in actual reality where compromise is necessary to be fairly ludicrous. Still it doesn't make me like anyone less. But I am crushed that she won't be president. She’s fiercely intelligent, works so hard, had so many great and detailed plans of how to improve people’s lives. She’s the reason American trans people can change their gender on their passports, did you know that? She and her team never publicised it at the time - or even in the campaign afaik - because of concerns about backlash.

And it’s not just that. Hillary Clinton, genius workaholic and half of a power couple to lead a superpower, with all the money and support and every newspaper endorsement, the most qualified candidate the US has ever had, running against the least. And it still wasn’t enough. She even got more votes! By a hair, and yet… never to be a President Rodham. I am so sad.

The first woman to be US president, the most powerful person in the world - is she even born yet? Am I going to be middle-aged before that happens? Am I going to be retired?

(That’s if I can retire. The US sneezes and Europe catches a cold; between Brexit and Trump’s mad protectionism I am truly afraid of the economic changes to come.)

You voted for a fascist? Are you that fucking scared of powerful women?

I mean. Wow there’s still a bunch more to talk about on that front. (I had the most depressing first date ever on Wednesday, which was drinks with a black guy from Oklahoma. I mean the date itself was pretty fun, but wow.) But I just had to have a sad about Clinton losing (as opposed to Trump winning). I was planning the post in the back of my mind. Various celebratory gifs; Buffy smiling at the end of Chosen; and a title. The second President Clinton (President Rodham if you’re nasty.)

Today I went to see my grandpa in Sussex. I haven’t seen him since last Christmas, what with going to Italy for six months and all, so today my mum, Youngest Sister and I went. He’s very very deaf and getting much more tired; he’s in his late nineties, so it’s entirely natural, but rather sad. We did what we usually do: talked with him, went to this fucking amazing Indian place (the best I’ve ever found by far, and that includes some Brick Lane eateries), did some errands for him. Then Youngest Sister went to a feminist meeting I’m sad to be missing, about fighting the fucking ludicrous abortion ban in Northern Ireland - appallingly, in part of my own country, abortions are illegal unless the mother’s life is in danger. I came to work. My students haven’t shown up, so I’m doing the same thing I’ve been doing all day: a moment without a specific thing to think about, and I’m worrying about the American election.

Oh, and here’s something else I think is important that I haven’t seen talked about much. There’ve been a lot of Brexit comparisons drawn with Trump’s ascendancy. I think some of those parallels hold water, but some don’t - I won’t get into that here, although we can do it in comments. (Also, the polls DID predict Brexit. People were surprised because they ignored the margin of error and that London is its own world.) I think the possibly more instructive, and scarier, comparison is with the British general election last year.

The Conservatives were not predicted a majority. Professional politicians, party leaders, well-known pundits all predicted a minority government or hung parliament. When the exit polls came out at 10pm, showing a ten-seat Tory majority, Paddy Ashdown (former Lib Dem leader and eminence grisee) said he’d eat his hat if they were correct. They weren’t. The Tories had a majority of seventeen.

Why were the polls so wrong? ‘Shy Tories’. People were not willing to admit to pollsters that they were planning to vote Conservative. How much stronger must that effect be for Trump voters? They’re not idiots; they know what people think. And there’s a documented effect where people say they’ll vote for a woman (or POC) but in the booth? They don’t.

However far ahead Clinton looks now, I can’t believe it yet. I want to. But… last May I went to my friends’ flat to watch the election get called. We started with olives and wine, and then at 10pm the Tory victory was predicted and we switched to chocolate and gin. I fell asleep WhatsApping a friend on the 23rd of June and woke up just before seven am to see three crying emojis on my screen. Chills go through me at the thought of it happening again, and worse.

I was scared of Romney. I’m scared of Republicans in general: I have a lot of friends who are women, POC, LGBTQ+, or some combination, living in the USA and deserving full rights over their bodies and lives. But it was nothing like this.

Title: At Her Beck And CallAuthor:lokifanWord count: ~2200Characters/pairings: Bill/Fleur/DracoRating: NC-17Summary: Fleur’s having a long day at work. Bill decides she deserves some entertainment.Content: Erotic humiliation, dom/sub dynamics; phone/Floo sexDisclaimer: The boys and girls belong to JKR, even though I’m often much nicer to them than she is.Author’s Notes: I finished and posted this for August’s amnesty over at daily_deviant; it was originally started for a “phone/Floo sex” theme.

Also, this is like… the third or fourth threesome I’ve written Bill in. And I hardly ever write him. I guess I think the oldest Weasley would be really good about sharing?

It's bi visibility day! Bi visibility is AWESOME. You know why? I was interested in LGBT stuff from when I was... fourteen, right, when I got interested in politics generally. I had out gay friends and had a (very vague, born-in-the-wrong-body-narrative) sense of what being trans was. And I was SIXTEEN before I knew what the B stood for. SIXTEEN. SIXTEEEEEEN.

It would've saved me literally all of my sexuality-related confusion, in retrospect, if bi people - who surveys suggest SIGNIFICANTLY OUTNUMBER gay people - were not invisible.

Also, not wanting to make it all about me: bi people are significantly more likely to suffer depression, to be closeted, and to self-harm or self-medicate than straight or even gay people. Bi women are THREE TIMES as likely to be raped as our straight sisters. That last, shocking fact is likely associated with the fact that abusers are really good at finding people who are vulnerable, dismissed by the social order, and unlikely to be believed if they report abuse - and the twin stereotypes of bi people as slutty and deceitful mean that bi women are even less likely to be believed if they report a sexual assault. So we can all do a bit to fight back against those terrible statistics, just in small, day-to-day ways.

Hey, I never told you guys I was at the last day of Nine Worlds! It was SUPER brief so sadly I didn’t meet any flisters (and saw like five people across the bar I wanted to chat with and then they were gone. *waves at rozk and abigailb*) It was great though. At about 11a.m. I was at Miss Godfrey and Ginger Nut’s flat, having stayed over after bridesmaid-ing, and feeling happy but very sweaty and morning-after-y, when what do I see? A Facebook post offering a Sunday pass because a friend of mine, sadly, had ill family members. So I nabbed it, went home and showered, and then LAST SIX HOURS OF NINE WORLDS YAY. Which just consisted of barcon, basically, but it was lovely to stop in and soak up the energy.

Also hahaha it was funny being in that particular place, because like. Suddenly am not the femme-iest queer girl in the room! *hugs dora_the_nymph and her glitter nail varnish* And at the wedding - well both brides are very femme, right, but I was in this plunging bridesmaid dress with a massive petticoat and sparkly heels, and then some mutual friends from uni showed up, who were two lesbians + girlfriends all rocking the buttoned-up-shirt-and-jeans uniform. The five of us went outside to hang out/smoke, and I looked around and was just like ...yes, yep, I am definitely on one side of this dynamic.

(A ~friend of mine did my hair before a fancy evening one time, and I loooove getting my hair played with and pulled and she was being all subtly dominant and it was great. But it does make me laugh in retrospect because like, how do femme women flirt with each other? CONSTRUCTING ELABORATE UPDOS. Obviously.)

ANYWAY. I’m staying in tonight and looking at jobs abroad (my work has become very part-time, I don’t think it’ll be tenable after October) and I’m thinking I’ll do a meme to encourage chatting. I’ve missed you guys.

So I have a question: what songs do you guys associate with fandom? Not just with a particular character, pairing or canon (although obviously that can end up fitting the bill) but with fandom itself as a place, experience, or group of people.

Here are my three to start, in ascending order of soppiness. Feel free to be more sarcastic in your own selections :D

Stories of tortures used by debauchersLurid, licentious and vileMake me smileAll books can be indecent booksThough recent books are bolderFor filth, I'm glad to say, is in the mind of the beholderI could tell you stories about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!

Of course there’ll always be AUs. And on an intellectual level I think changing mediums and introducing a bunch more creative voices means that the play can’t be part of the text of the novels, so it’s not really ‘canon’ in that sense - but it does FEEL like part of the whole to me. I just…